by Don Jordan
From Celadon’s opening salvo Dryden draws the audience immediately into the louche world of Restoration comedy:
Cel. Cannot I serve you in the gentleman’s room, ladies?
Fla. Which of us would you serve?
Cel. Either of you, or both of you.
Fla. Why, could you not be constant to one?
Cel. Constant to one! – I have been a courtier, a soldier, and a traveller, to good purpose, if I must be constant to one: Give me some twenty, some forty, some a hundred mistresses! I have more love than any woman can turn her to.
Flo. Bless us! Let us be gone, cousin: We two are nothing in his hands.
Cel. Yet, for my part, I can live with as few mistresses as any man. I desire no superfluities; only for necessary change or so, as I shift my linen.8
At this point, Florimel says in an aside that Celadon is a rare sort of fellow’ who fits her humour ‘exactly’. Within a few more lines of sparring, Celadon says much the same of Florimel and the audience knows it is about to be taken along on a wave of wit and pleasure before the two finally admit they are made for one another.
By the end of the play Celadon and Florimel have agreed a truce; they will be married – but it will be a marriage born from the cool, knowing style of Restoration wit.
Flo. But this marriage is such a bugbear to me! Much might be if we could invent but any way to make it easy.
Cel. Some foolish people have made it uneasy, by drawing the knot faster than they need; but we that are wiser will loosen it a little.
Flo. Tis true, indeed, there’s some difference betwixt a girdle and a halter.
Thus, at the very close of the play the characters reveal they will not stay true inside their marriage. With cynical dialogue like this from an artist of Dryden’s ability, it is hardly surprising the contemporary theatre was the window to the age. In the words of one modern critic, ‘The strongest case for regarding this as an especially dissolute age must. . . rest on taste in the theatre.’9
The play was so popular that Killigrew included it regularly in the repertory, staging it many times in the ensuing years – and this at a period when plays might fold in a day or two, very seldom lasting more than a week before giving way to new material. A measure of its triumph was that Pepys and Sir William went again in May, and Pepys with his wife in August. The following January the play was published. Pepys bought a copy, complaining that in the preface Dryden ‘seems to brag’ although it was a good play’. Later that month, the Pepyses went a third time. Nell became London’s Cinderella. According to a bishop she was ‘the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in court’.10
The Maiden Queen propelled the young woman brought up in a brothel to the equally louche circles of the court aristocracy. When the theatres closed for the summer, the aristocratic poet and playboy Charles Sackville whisked Nell off to a love nest in Epsom along with his friend Charles Sedley. The threesome became public knowledge and the satirists had a field day.
It provided a moment of frivolity before London was threatened once more. As was so often the case during Charles’s reign, gravity had been masked by levity.
* LAMDA (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts), founded in 1861, claims to be the oldest continuons acting school in London.
† Not to be confused with her younger sister Rebecca, also an actress.
PART 3
1667–1685
THE YEARS OF TURMOIL
CHAPTER 15
THE THREAT FROM ABROAD
While London struggled back to normality, the government grappled with a serious problem it had yet to make public: the Exchequer was empty. Among the state offices drained of finance was the biggest and most important, the Navy Board. With no money coming from the Exchequer, the board ran out of cash to pay the fleet. By early 1667 it was obvious that the war, begun in 1665, simply could not go on.
Keeping one of its first-rate 100-gun warships at sea cost the Admiralty £3500 every month, which helped explain why the fleet tended to sail for short periods at a time and naval wars were fought in brief encounters.1 To put this huge sum in perspective, Robert Hooke’s salary from the Royal Society was £50 per annum plus lodgings. Sir Peter Lely earned £200 a year as royal painter (augmented by private commissions), while the King’s personal friend of long standing, Thomas Killigrew, earned £500 a year as a gentleman of the bedchamber – and this only after years of exile and penury. The sum of £3500 was therefore a very considerable one.
Various issues were.to blame for the catastrophic lack of money. The plague had hit tax revenues badly, and just when it looked as if the economic life of London was returning and tax revenues increasing, the Great Fire cut the economic heart out of the city. The public purse was further strained by the cost of Charles’s expensive court, not least by the avaricious demands of his mistress Barbara, Countess Castlemaine.
When the government needed money, the normal course of action was either to ask Parliament to raise taxes, or to borrow’ from the city bankers and gold merchants. Unfortunately, Parliament had lost much of its enthusiasm for banking a king whose dislike of the institution was proving to echo that of his father. The cataclysms of the preceding years meant moreover that there was little money to be had among the bankers who lent money to the Crown. The goldsmith-banker Thomas Viner said it was hard to find a goldsmith in the city, let alone one who had money to lend.2 London’s bankers had removed their money from town. Now they were leery about lending what they had to fund a war that was running on and going badly.
To make matters worse, even if the money could be found to pay the men and provide the victuals, it was as difficult to find unemployed men to crew the warships as it was to find a compliant banker. The naval towns stretching along the Thames Estuary from London into Kent had been hard hit by the plague. Seafaring families had been wiped out or had moved away. The Crown’s negotiations with Parliament over money had become turgid and fractious. Miscalculations about the state of hostilities, plus Charles’s domestic financial problems, were also to blame. The chief issue was simply the enormous cost of the war. The shortfall in revenue to the Exchequer caused by the plague was more than £500,000, while the total cost of the war was approaching £5 million.3
Following the major sea battles of the previous summer, the King and his admirals had taken the view that hostilities for the foreseeable future were at an end. Both sides had suffered severe blows. Owing to fluctuating fortunes, the war had subsided into a ceasefire. Erroneously believing they had the upper hand, the English began peace talks at Breda, feeling the Dutch were unlikely to retaliate during negotiations. The English had not taken into account the fact that they had not succeeded in destroying Dutch military sea power. Peace talks dragged on for over a year. In the face of multiple problems at home and drawn-out talks in Breda, Charles decided to take a gamble.4
In the winter of 1666-7, Charles instructed the fleet to be laid up in Chatham dockyard, securely situated miles inland up the Medway River, and dismissed the crews. Charles assumed that military defences on the river would ward off any Dutch attack. Much store was laid on the effectiveness of a hefty chain stretching from bank to bank in order to prevent warships getting through to the dockyard. The Dutch had other ideas.
In June 1667, a huge Dutch battle fleet set sail for England. News from coastal shipping and garrisons in Kent quickly spread towards London. Among those watching the Dutch fleet gather at the mouth of the Thames was John Evelyn. He saw the fleet manoeuvre for several days, testing for a response, then, seeing none, sail up the Medway. On 10 June the Dutch blasted past the few shore batteries in service and severed the chain across the Medway with ease.
Between 10 and 13 June the invaders set fire to Chatham dockyard and everything in it. They blew up or burned thirteen English ships before towing two major vessels back to Amsterdam. Their most important prize was the Royal Charles, pride of the English navy, first under Çromwell (when it was called the Naseby) and t
hen under Charles – the very ship that had brought the King home from exile.
On the first evening of the attack, Charles, instead of directing defences, was partying with Barbara Palmer. According to one account, they made a game out of searching for a moth.
News of the enemy destruction caused panic in London. Rumours spread that it was a full-scale Dutch invasion, backed up by a French army. What if the Dutch sailed up the Thames and took the city? With the best of the English fleet destroyed there was little to stop them. Panic turned to terror. Andrew Marvell, an astute onlooker, recorded:
Up to the Bridge contagious terror struck:
The Tower itself with the near danger shook.’5
Anti-monarchist crowds gathered in London shouting ‘Parliament!’ Some courtiers, thinking the King would be deposed, fled the city. Barbara Palmer shouted hysterically that she would be first to be lynched. If there had been any lynching she might well have been first; her public position as the King’s mistress, allied to her Catholicism, made her a hate figure to the determinedly Protestant London mob.
With an invasion seemingly imminent, the King and his brother snapped out of their complacency. They called for a barge and took themselves downstream to the waterfront of the old city. Once there they ordered the sinking of ships downstream from the Tower to block the river. Marvell, forever unimpressed by monarchy, watched as London was protected by nothing more than scuttled ships:
Once a deep river, now with timber floored,
And shrunk, least navigable, to a ford.’6
Then, as if by a miracle, the Dutch turned back. The Dutch admiral de Ruyter later admitted that had he known the state of England’s defences he would have carried on to London. So the capital was saved, as was the Crown – but not Charles’s reputation. Lampoons appeared, making a great deal of the true story of the King and his mistress playing at hunting a moth while the Dutch burned the fleet. The name of the Emperor Nero was invoked. Charles hurriedly arranged further peace talks to be held at Breda. Such was the power of the East India Company that it had its own representative at the talks. Peace was agreed, on terms unfavourable to England.
After the triple disasters of fire, war and pestilence, London had little to be proud of. In Holland, the Dutch put the Royal Charles on show at Hellevoetsluis as a tourist attraction and outraged the court at Whitehall and the navy by showing foreign dignitaries around it. Charles complained that his royal dignity was besmirched. The Dutch stopped the tours.
Scapegoats were sought, and found. One of the unfortunates was Peter Pett, the only Commissioner of the Navy with any knowledge of ship design or building – ironically, Pett had been the architect and builder of the Royal Charles. Having also designed the first frigate, a type that would become a mainstay of the navy for many years to come, thanks to his vast knowledge he had been given responsibility for the Royal Dockyards at Chatham. Pett’s apparent crime was to have failed to protect the fleet more strongly. He assured all who enquired that the chain across the Medway would hold against a Dutch raid: it did not. It was said that Pett should also have brought the major ships further up the river, where the Dutch would have found it difficult to reach them.
Pett’s final crime was that once the raid had begun and the British fleet set on fire, he had been more anxious to save models of the endangered ships than the ships themselves. He suffered a good deal of comic abuse when he told an official inquiry that he had saved the models because they were more valuable. There was method in his actions. He understood that plans alone were insufficient to build a warship – scale models were required so that the carpenters could see exactly how the ship was put together. Models were therefore an essential part of the shipbuilding process. As for the charges directed at Pett for not being prepared, they could equally have been directed at senior officers of the army and navy. They were not. Andrew Marvell wrote:
After this loss, to relish discontent
Someone must be accused by punishment
All our miscarriages on Pett must fall:
His name alone seems fit to answer all.7
Charles’s sacking of Pett was particularly cruel. The Petts were an illustrious family of shipbuilders and designers who had been associated with the Stuarts and the Royal Navy for generations. Peter’s father, Phineas, First Commissioner for Chatham before his son took up the post, was one of England’s finest ship designers. His skills had brought him to the personal attention of Charles I. In 1634 he made a toy ship on wheels for the four-year-old Prince Charles to trundle up and down the long gallery at St James’s Palace. Before that he made for Charles’s elder brother Henry a scale model of a ship of the line that was twenty-eight feet long. Since the sixteenth century the Pett family had harvested their own forest in Kent to supply the oak necessary for hewing into ships’ keels.* They had sufficient surplus cash to invest in the slave trade.
Phineas and Peter were among those instrumental in creating the modern warship that fought the Dutch wars. In 1637 they had built the vast Sovereign of the Seas for Charles I at their dockyard at Woolwich. By then, the principal warships were growing so large that only London could provide the manpower, money and resources to build them.8 Merchant ships were still built at dockyards all around England, Scotland and Ireland, but only the yards on the Thames or at Portsmouth were capable of constructing the new, super-large warships designed to deliver a devastating broadside to knock out enemy vessels without the messy business of having to board them first.
The scale of the new ships pioneered by the Petts was impressive. The Sovereign of the Seas weighed 2072 tons and her keel – from which sprouted a skeleton hewn from hundreds of mature English oak trees – measured 127 feet. Her main mast was 113 feet of Scandinavian spruce, with a main yard 105 feet long. Her guns were all forged of brass, arranged in three tiers to bring maximum firepower to bear on the enemy. On the top tier were forty-four guns, on the second tier thirty-four and on the lower tier twenty-two, making a hundred guns in all. To enable this great war machine to work required a complement of 850 mariners, officers and marines. Her stern was so richly carved and gilded, and her firepower so great, she was known to Dutch sailors as the Golden Devil.
Peter Pett went on to build the next generation of ships of the line, including the Royal Charles, then named the Naseby, at the family dockyard at Woolwich for the Parliamentary navy in 1655. Not only had the Royal Charles carried Charles II home from Holland in 1660, it took part in three actions against the Dutch in 1665-6. What must have truly irked the King was that this of all vessels was tow ed away by the Dutch and turned into a tourist attraction.† Pett, who had taken no part in the disastrous decision to mothball the fleet, but who had been involved in designing the hijacked flagship, was singled out to be made an example of.
A much more important figure than Pett was also forced to resign. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, Charles’s longest-serving and most senior courtier and statesman, was a much more prominent target than Pett. Though Clarendon had been against the war from the beginning, he was vulnerable. His view of the Crown was based on an Elizabethan model of monarchy advised by a close cabinet and moderated by Parliament. From the point of view of the absolutist Stuarts this was not an ideal model.9 Indeed, Charles had expressed his disdain for it.10 Clarendon had been Charles’s advisor since the civil wars; he had developed a propensity to lecture, and Charles now found him irritating. For all his abilities as a politician, Clarendon had little social finesse and even less desire to bend with the wind. His final gaffe was to make public his animosity towards Barbara Palmer. From the moment Charles returned from Europe with Barbara in tow in 1660, Clarendon had made his feelings towards the courtesan clear, cutting her in court and instructing his wife to do the same. He underestimated the King’s feelings towards Barbara, and when the opportunity presented itself to Charles, Clarendon discovered he was out in the cold. Within weeks of the Medway disaster, he was forced to resign. Facing impeachment on trumped-up ch
arges in Parliament, he fled to France and wrote his memoirs.
Shortly afterwards, Nell Gwyn opened at the Theatre Royal in Sir Robert Howard s The Duke of Lerma. Howard was a member of the Country Party, the newly emergent anti-court faction later known as the Whigs. They were opposed to the pro-monarchist Court Party, later known as the Tories, and especially to the Duke ofYork. Nell played Maria, the put-upon daughter of the Duke, a ‘Renaissance overreacher. . . unscrupulous’.11 The King, as usual, went on opening night, accompanied by Samuel Pepys, marking the latter’s rapid social rise.
Pepys thought the play could be conceived as a critique of the King and his relationship with the royal mistress. A more particular interpretation was that it was a veiled attack on the already disgraced Clarendon. In real life, the Duke of Lerma (1553–1625) had been a favourite of King Philip III of Spain who fell from grace and was stripped of his power. In the background to the power struggle lay Spain’s bankruptcy during a war with the Dutch. There was one other odd contrast to be drawn: although Philip III was as religious as Charles was irreligious, both were seen as being discreditably detached from the day-today business of government.
If such parallels were intended, Charles overlooked them. He loved Nell and the play.
By the following year, 1668, the charred skeleton of St Pauls Cathedral still sat mouldering on Ludgate Hill. The intense activity as London was rebuilt around it sounded a reproof to the church authorities, who could not agree what to do with their ruined cathedral. Downstream, that reproof was echoed in the royal shipyards at Deptford and Woolwich as they resounded with the din of shipwrights working non-stop. Thanks to lessons belatedly learned after the disaster at Chatham, a naval rebuilding programme was instigated to make good the destruction. The King, passionate about all things nautical, took a personal interest.